Category: Personal

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  • Weekly Notes 28/2025

    Nothing to write in my prelude for this week.

    What I’m reading?

    • Courage to be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi (10%)
    • The 6:20 Man by David Baldacci (8%)
    • Will our next users be AI agents? The future of content delivery with Fabrice Lacroix, founder of Fluid Topics (podcast) by Tom Johnson
      • “Writing for AI agents requires a new approach. Concepts like minimalism may be insufficient, as implicit knowledge (what we assume human experts know) must be made explicit for machines to understand.”
      • “The technical writer’s role is expanding from pure authoring to orchestrating and curating knowledge from many different sources for ingestion into a central system.”
      • “The mindset is shifting from simply writing documentation to engineering a knowledge base that can be reliably used by both humans and intelligent machines.”
    • Don’t Ignore Your Moral Intuition About Phones by Cal Newport
      • “We hesitate to take a strong stance because we fear the data might reveal we were wrong, rendering us guilty of a humiliating sin in technocratic totalitarianism, letting the messiness of individual human emotion derail us from the optimal operating procedure. We’re desperate to do the right – read: most acceptable to our social/tribal community – thing, and need a chattering class of experts to assure us that we are.”
      • “When it comes to children, however, we cannot and should not abdicate our moral intuition.”
      • “Data can be informative, but a lot of parenting comes from the gut.”
    • Stop Snorting Narrative by Tanvi Bhakta
      • “When I went to college, I had the internet again. It was scary how easy it was to substitute reading for social media – especially something like Reddit, which is mostly text based and allows for rabbit holes that felt exactly like reading a less rigorous Mary Roach book. I stopped reading long form almost entirely in those 4 years.”
      • “Like most of us, I’ve been struggling with some form of dependence on social media for the better part of a decade. But when I make the effort to remove myself from them, my life doesn’t get better. It isn’t the social media that is the problem, it is my desire to consume narrative. Stories are fundamental to who we are as humans2, and I am old enough that I know how to substitute for the internet. The exercise, then, is not to merely stop doing the thing that is hurting me. It is to answer a few fundamental questions for myself:
        • What does rest look like for me, to actually feel restored?
        • What activity do I fill my time with, to actually allow for thought?”
    • The new KSRTC bus designs are plain sad by vadakkus
      • “All expectations that everyone had have shattered into a thousand pieces. The design is bland and outdated in every sense of the word. It renders the buses invisible on the road. In these modern times of AI-driven design where everything pops and sizzles, these are just… lifeless. Sad. (More photos here). These are no Aanavandis. These are plain terrible!”
      • “Malayalees love to hate KSRTC, but it is also very closely intertwined with the Malayalee pop culture ethos and identity. It is an integral entry in the lineup of icons that reminds them of home, an emotional connect that is manifested by the brand.”
      • “Most KSRTC well wishers would implore KSRTC and the honorable transport minister to please, please reinstate the existing KSRTC livery for Fast Passenger and Super Fast buses. Well changing the livery was tried once, two decades ago, and it didn’t work out. Please let it be your legacy that you rebuilt the brand value of the organisation rather than having changed it for the worse. Or even better, please restart body-building at KSRTC workshops.”

    What I’m writing?

    I am back on X and Mastodon again. I am also back on Tumblr. All of these are linked above if you visit the blog.

    What I’m Watching?

    These are interesting insights into how GenZ is thinking. I am also reading more about Gen Alpha and Beta, as these are the generations my children belong to. Gen Z is an important bunch, though.

  • One of the things I like to do is to try other publishing methods. I learnt of Leaflet from Jaymo a week ago. It languishes in one of my open Chrome tabs.

  • Weekly Notes 27/2025

    I realized I was not listening to podcasts that I usually would. I have downloaded PocketCasts to fix that. I have also downloaded the X and Tusky app for Android to access X and Mastodon. Thus ends my social media detox.

    What I’m reading?

    1. Education is free, Learning is expensive by Seth Godin
    • “If knowledge was power, controlling access was essential.”
    • “They even call it the ‘admissions office.’”

    2. On SpaceNews going paywalled, and the broader disregard for archiving in journalism by Jatan Mehta

    I read Doc Searls’ blog post about the subweb only two days back and now to be bought into my own space world so quickly is sad to see.

    3. Six Paths by Vishwesh Shetty (Qissa Comics)

    4. Build an Epic Career by Ankur Warikoo

    What I’m watching?

    Matt D’Avella is someone I started following when I was into minimalism. Good to see that he is still trying to hang in there.

    I have been trying to explore solarpunk and lunarpunk themes in my story writing. I haven’t written much this year. That’s something I hope to fix at this year’s NaNoWriMo.

    I’m seeing many finance YouTubers and podcast hosts talk about cryptocurrency again in India. Most of the stuff that I have watched had been sponsored by the cryptocurrency exchange, CoinDCX. Another cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, which had decided to not comply with India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) guidelines for cryptocurrency exchanges and had left India is also returning with a India Blockchain Yatra.

    Mukesh Bansal’s solocast on fasting.

    Madhu Kela, knowingly or unknowingly says in this podcast, “China is an autocracy, India is a bureaucracy”, although he corrects it to democracy before he completes.

    Storytelling in Malayalam

    My Instagram watch time is also growing. I might add things I watched from there as well, starting next week.

  • From Mumbai Paused:

    However, even now, we don’t receive the connections we seek and the answers we want. We get what they want to sell. Look at the book recommendations you’re served, even after years of ‘learning’ who you are. Then remember the person at the old neighbourhood bookstore who could glance at you and hand you something that changed your life. Rare now, but unforgettable.

    The post also provides a section of geology-inspired vocabulary to use.

  • Malayalam storytelling

    When I was little I used to listen to Malayalam folktales from my grandmother. I was wondering who would provide a similar experience for my children. I am happy to see storytelling creators emerge who bring forth such storytelling on a public platform.

    My son started listening and my daughter joined in.

  • While I am writing Weekly Notes in text, I am also seeing Weekly Notes in pictures on Instagram. I might add that to next week’s Weekly Notes.

  • Weekly Notes 26/2025

    I almost lost this domain name. I was only on Instagram and Netflix.

    What I’m reading?

    • Platform Reality by Robin Sloan
      • “Ted Gioia’s recent newsletter style is a key example of 2020s ventilated prose, an unmissable textual trend.”
      • Always read the PS.
    • Playability by Jay
      • “One of things happening in culture that I think we can all feel intuitively is that increasingly media mediums are playable. I don’t mean ‘gamification’, and I don’t simply mean ‘engagement’ (but metrics inside of systems are certainly part of it). But the sense that people – Gen Z and Gen A, are literate in exploring systems. They poke at the rules, bend them, maybe even break them and see how the system responds far more than millennials did. We played the game, but didn’t fully appreciate that culture is an emergent property of a system’s design.”
      • “gamification (In my opinion) is mostly about obedience theatre.”
      • “Gamification is used to make you feel like you’re playing when you’re really just complying.”
      • “Code writes the rules. Rules shape incentives. Incentives shape behaviour. And behaviour becomes culture.”
      • “This is why playability matters. Not because everything is a game, but because we are all beginning to think like players, and this changes how we should understand agency inside of systems.”
      • “There’s a lot more we can say about both of these challenges, but in short they make doing solarpunk both harder and more necessary. The more cyberpunk the world gets, the more useful solarpunks become. The more material reality is buried under layers of digital abstraction, the better it feels to actually get your hands dirty.”
    • AI Won’t Live on Publisher Sites by Ben Werdmuller
      • “Almost nobody is visiting homepage after homepage. Readers almost universally read content from a central feed of information.”
      • “Email newsletters are, at their heart, another version of this model. By subscribing to a publisher’s newsletter, you’re adding their content to your reverse-chronological feed of information.”
      • “If AI lives in the browser, as it does in products like Dia (and soon in Chrome), you can query not just one information source, but every information source you visit through that browser.”
      • “publishers are better off considering how they might embrace emerging standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP) into their offerings so that their information can be consumed.”
    • Use a Lot of Words by Seth Godin
      • “Verbosity is the new brevity.”
      • “AI isn’t like that. In fact, our concision is getting in the way of the insight we’re looking for.”
    • How I Turned ChatGPT Into My Personal Nutrition Coach and You Can Too by Brett McKay

    What I’m watching?

    The video has some AI tool suggestions that I want to try out.

    This video taught me a lot about Dharavi and its history.

    This video asks an interesting question and not sure if it really answers it.

  • Weekly Notes 22/2025

    I spent most time this week with work. I ended up not doing anything I expected to be able to do this week.

    For the coming week, my in-laws are coming, I am going to Mumbai to get a passport, and I want to take a look at all the things I missed in the last few weeks of engaging with work.

    Watched

    I believe the title is misleading, but don’t let that stop you from watching this video. My main point is to view the world as a stack of layers. This is what he refers to as wrappers (in a 3D sense). I have unfurled these wrappers into layers to make it easy for you to see.

    The biggest risk is taken by business people who connect a product or service with customers. As you move away from the customer, the risk (risk is the wrong word, but no synonym fits better) decreases. We can see this with the changes AI is introducing at this layer. Similarly, the best earning potential is often found at this level, but it also comes with the highest potential for loss.

    This made me reflect on which layer I prefer to work in. I’ve found that I might excel in support roles more than main roles. Even when I watch something, I’m more interested in the support character’s work than the main character, who often gets all the attention.

    I studied mechanical engineering, which plays an important role at many basic layers. You can’t ship without a ship. However, this doesn’t always create the most value (or money) for the customer. If you are in this layer you feel like you are being exploited. Without it, businesses would struggle. But, without a good or service being sold to a customer at the highest layer, you would struggle.

    Money flows down. When you’re squeezed by a layer above, it’s hard to earn more than the person in the layer above you. To earn more, you have to provide more value to the layer above you. The closer you are to the customer, the higher you earn for the value you provide.

    Many things can push you to choose a layer to work at. Your circumstances, your attitude, or what you learnt. If you want to earn more, you must learn to be of service in the layer above you.

    I did not watch, read or listen to anything besides this. I am hoping to return to a more normal cadence of writing, reading, watching, and listening by the end of the September quarter.

  • Week 21/2025

    I have been more focussed on work this week. This week was much better for all of us health-wise as all of us were sick in Week 20.

    Writing

    I did a lot of writing offline. But, I did not get any online writing done.

    Reading

    I did not get any reading (listening or reading) done.

    The rains have begun in Pune, much earlier than predicted. We got caught up in one such torrential downpour on Monday. Other than that we have mostly been enjoying the rains from home or office.

    Most of my online presence has been on Instagram. I had wanted to be on blogs, but I have not got a block of time on which to focus and read a blog post.

    We are waiting for our kid’s schools to re-open after the summer vacation.

    I am expecting next week also to be work focussed. I expect to continue writing offline and do not expect to write online. I am planning to return to the gym from Monday.